


My Mother Would Be A Falconress

by AuthorAuthor



Series: War Is The Father [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom, Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: BAMF Frigga, Character Study, Frigga Does What She Wants, Frigga Feels, Frigga is Vanir, Frigga's A++ Parenting, Gen, I have a lot of feelings about Loki and Frigga, Kid Loki and Kid Thor, Loki & Frigga Feels, Loki Feels, Minor body dysphoria, Mother-Son Relationship, Odin isn't the only one with questionable parenting skills, Odin's A+ Parenting, POV Frigga, Parent Frigga, Sneaky Frigga, world-building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-16
Updated: 2014-09-16
Packaged: 2018-02-17 14:16:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2312570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuthorAuthor/pseuds/AuthorAuthor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Loki is her consolation prize.</em><br/> <br/>  <em>He is the last thing she expects when her husband returns from his wars, reeking of blood and unwashed leather, but the paternal instinct can soften even the most battle-hardened warrior. As he stands before her, clasping the Jotun-blue baby in his arms, the mighty All-Father looks as anxious as a mother cat trying to nurse a duckling.</em></p><p>  <em>Frigga puts out her hands, accepts him for what he is: a replacement for the son Odin has claimed as his own. A prize, looted from the battlefield by the All-Father himself.</em></p><p><em>She looks down at the squalling, alien child, already made fretful by the heat of the room, and thinks: yes.</em> This <em>one will be mine.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	My Mother Would Be A Falconress

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this piece came about as I was clicking through the Marvel wiki one day (as one does) and read that Frigga is originally from Vanaheim. This one detail was so exciting to me that I very nearly flipped my laptop off the table, and had to hurry off to have 9000 words-worth of feelings. And here they are!
> 
> The title for this fic is blatantly plagiarized from [Robert Duncan's poem](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238094) of the same name, which I first read on [poem-locker.tumblr.com](http://poem-locker.tumblr.com) \- a really lovely blog with a wonderful and well-curated selection of poetry. I am not even a little bit sorry that all of my favourite poems from that blog give me Loki feels ;)

//

All of Vanaheim wears white on the day the Einherjar guards come to take their princess away. White is the colour of mourning.

She is hardly more than a child, forced into maturity by the lessons in duty and self-command the war has taught her. It is to stop the war that she has been promised to the King of Asgard, and so she goes, chin held high, eyes clear, heartsick.

She is determined, by her grace and nobility, to show the Aesir that a conquered race can comport itself with dignity, to stand forever before the All-Father’s eyes as a reminder of the people he has so cruelly subjugated. It is with a slowly-mounting sense of baffled rage that she realizes Odin can look at her, and not think of Vanaheim at all.

//

They treat her kindly at the court, and pay her the respect due to her rank and learning, but she misses Vanaheim: mourns for her conquered homeland, where the sky had seemed to stretch on to eternity without ever meeting the earth. Asgard, by comparison, is cramped, hemmed in by mountains, the buildings constructed as though heaped the one on top of the other by a careless hand. The Aesir themselves reek of the meat and mead they stuff themselves with at their raucous feasts, and when heard through the All-Speak their speech comes across as crude and atonal compared to the lyricism of her native language.

Her duty, the Aesir tell her, is to her husband; to her children, when they come; and to the Realm, in that order.

It is not long before she finds the time beginning to weigh heavily on her hands. Odin is often away, fighting wars and battles on other Realms. He is the All-Father, after all, and a father must sometimes take off his belt to chastise unruly children. When he is home, he requires only that she be cheerful and affectionate, and listen with every sign of attentiveness to his endlessly dull anecdotes about battlefields she has never seen and weapons she will never wield. Her children, when they come, will be fussed over by nursemaids and teachers and weapons masters; and Asgard itself treats its foreign-born queen too condescendingly to ever think of asking anything from her.

There is only one throne on Asgard, she learns, and it does not belong to her.

She is patient, though, and does not allow herself more than a moment's self-pity. She does, however, need something to do, and after some trial and error, she takes up spinning. She asks for the flax they grow on Vanaheim, as a reminder of the land of her birth, and the All-Father graciously grants it to her. Spinning is a harmless occupation, a blameless pastime for a woman. The Aesir say nothing against it, and leave her to her spinning wheel.

//

From before the hour of his birth, Thor is his father’s. Odin, flushed and happy with anticipation, speaks of him as such:

My _son will be a fine warrior…_

 _I will teach_ my _son to wield a sword…_

 _When_ my _son is born…_

Frigga nods, acquiesces, cedes her first-born to her husband’s thrall: your son, yes, he is _your_ son.

She can see the guilt in the All-Father’s face when he speaks thusly, a tacit acknowledgement that he is aware of his own intentions. Although he is born of her body, Thor is never really hers.

He is a fine, strong baby, big and bouncing, with smiling eyes.

“Like his father,” she says, as though it is a compliment.

“Like his father,” Odin agrees, and reaches into her arms to take her first-born.

Loki is her consolation prize.

He is the last thing she expects when her husband returns from his wars, reeking of blood and unwashed leather, but the paternal instinct can soften even the most battle-hardened warrior. Standing before her with the Jotun-blue baby clasped in his arms, the mighty All-Father looks as anxious as a mother cat trying to nurse a duckling.

Frigga puts out her hands, accepts him for what he is: a replacement for the son Odin has claimed as his own. A prize, looted from the battlefield by the All-Father himself.

She looks down at the squalling, alien child, already made fretful by the heat of the room, and thinks: yes. _This_ one will be mine.

//

Laufey never asks after his son, never protests that he is being raised in ignorance among the slaughterers of his kind. Odin takes this as further proof of Jotun callousness. Frigga is not so sure.

The Jotuns have suffered a crushing defeat. There is much to think of, much to be done, and a king cannot waste his energies fretting over the fate of one small child. Laufey will not risk the fragile peace between his realm and Asgard over an infant, and she respects his choice. Her own parents, after all, sent their daughter away to be bound in matrimony to Vanaheim’s adversary, and never once, in all those centuries since, have they demanded that her exile be rescinded. Laufey’s own sacrifice, by comparison, is small.

Perhaps, too, it is not that he feels too little: rather, perhaps it is that he feels too much. Maybe this was the easier path, to pretend that both mother and child perished, rather than to be face, day after day, with a tangible reminder of the woman he loved, who died in battle with their child on her back.

In the end, Odin binds the child to take away his Jotun powers. If Laufey were to see his son again, face-to-face, he would not know him.

//

He is not an easy infant to care for. Acutely sensitive to every increase in temperature, she cannot hold him for long without taking the most elaborate precautions, or else the heat from her body makes him ill. He almost dies when a careless nursemaid lays him too close to the fireplace – after that, she takes over his care herself.

//

“Only one of you will ascend to the throne,” Odin tells the children, “but both of you were born to be kings.”

It is his idea of a joke.

Privately, she does not believe that he ever seriously considers making Loki king. It is Thor that he is shaping into his model of the ideal ruler – whom he can look at and see himself.

Thor will be King of Asgard. His future is assured, solid, and dependable, like himself.

Loki’s future has more… possibility.

She does not share her thoughts with her husband, but when she looks at Loki she can see three crowns, three potential kingdoms, if he has the wit to seize them. There is Asgard: Odin cannot in justice deny that he has a claim to it. There is Jotunheim, where he is the true son of their King Laufey. And there is the throne of Vanaheim, to which he is connected through her, their exiled princess.

There are obstacles in the way of each of them. He will have to fight, and fight hard, if he wants to win them. But she has confidence in him, and she does not think she overrates his abilities.

She tries on different futures for him, imagines different paths. Her prophetic gift is silent on the subject, but she feels sure of one thing. Both of her sons were born to rule: and both of them, someday, will wear a crown.

//

There is not a soul in the palace who does not know which of the All-Father's sons will inherit the throne.

It is not that Odin is ever cruel to either of them – he plays with them both alike, tells them stories, showers them with gifts, spends time with each of them when it does not interfere with his battles and councils of war. But the Aesir at court would have to be impossibly ignorant of their own laws not to know that it is the eldest son who inherits.

It is a small point, as far as Frigga is concerned. After all, regardless of what the Aesir themselves seem to think, Asgard is not the only kingdom with a throne. But petty lords and ladies sometimes think to curry favour by spoiling his elder son at the expense of the younger.

This fact is brought home to Frigga on the afternoon when she enters the nursery and finds the boys’ nurse and Thor in a bustle of activity, fetching boots and cloaks preparatory to going outside, while Loki sits as though chained to his desk, labouring over an exercise book.

The nurse sees her enters and drops a perfunctory curtsey. She does not look happy to see the queen. The boys’ nurse is a lady of the court, the wife of some warrior or another, and with her stocky build and florid complexion she is an Aesir through and through – and is therefore, according to the opinions of Asgard, better suited to raising the crown princes than their own, Vanaheim-born, mother.

When Thor sees her his face lights up and he rushes over wearing a single boot and with only one of his arms thrust through the sleeves of his cloak. He stops short in front of her and remembers himself far enough to scrape a low bow, then throws himself forwards to hug her around the waist. Touched, Frigga stoops to embrace him. Already he is being molded, shaped in his father’s image, and as little as she likes it, it is also true that Thor is a bright, open-hearted child, and she loves him. He is blessed with an elastic temperament, and a disposition to be pleased. Whatever crises lie ahead for him, he will always find the self-confidence to overcome them.

“Mother!” he cries. “We were just about to go to the stables, will you come? I’ve finished all my schoolwork, and Nurse said we could go see the horses as a treat, only -.” His eyes slip sideways to where his brother is sitting, staring fixedly at the desk in front of him, and the happy expression on his face flickers slightly.

She looks questioningly at the nurse, whose lips become compressed in a thin line. “I have given Prince Loki extra exercises to complete,” she says in a clipped voice. “He has not been… courteous.”

From the corner of her eye, Frigga sees Loki’s fingers go white as he grips his pen.

She makes no comment, but the nurse hurries on none the less: “I would remind you, All-Mother, that the King has placed me in charge of the children’s discipline -.”

“I had not forgotten,” she says, with as much mildness as she can muster. She had not said a word, had not asked a single question, and here the woman was forcing a reminder of her impotence down her throat.

The nurse, she decides, must go.

She keeps a smile on her face as she turns back to Thor, gives him a kiss on the cheek and sends him off to visit his horse. The nurse, when it becomes evident that Frigga does not intend to leave, seems disposed to linger, scowling, in the doorway, but she cannot ignore a direct order from her prince, and Thor soon drags the woman away, leaving Frigga alone with her son.

Loki still does not look up from his exercise book. He bites his lip and kicks his heels against the leg of his chair, and she notices his eyes are red. Although it goes against every maternal instinct she possesses, Frigga pretends not to notice how upset he is. She will be doing him no favours if she weakens his self-control by fretting over him now.

Instead, she takes a breath to steady herself and steps over to stand beside his desk.

“This is your lesson for today?”

She picks up the book he has been working in, and finds she has to look over the page twice before any of it becomes comprehensible to her, upset as she is. It is a sheet of mathematical exercises, simple proofs to be worked through.

“This is very good,” she tells him. He does not seem to notice the compliment, but at least he is looking at her now. Under the mask of indifference he is trying very hard to maintain, he looks tired and confused, and very close to crying.

She places her hand on the top of his head, and with this encouragement he presses himself against her side, as though hiding himself in the folds of her skirts. He is such a small child, and even with all of the best that Asgard can provide he has remained skinny and pale, like a plant that has grown for too long without sunlight

Thor and Odin, together, cast large shadows. She knows: she has lived overshadowed by the one for a very long time herself. She has learned to make shift.

She has long suspected the nurse of favouritism, but she cannot go to Odin with her complaints. Childcare is women’s work on Asgard, at least until the boys are old enough to wield a weapon or sit astride a horse, and the All-Father will not welcome what he would think was a trivial interruption while he is engaged in business befitting a monarch. The situation is one that she will have to take care of herself.

For now, she gathers her quiet son up in her arms, holds him close. She takes him back to her sitting room and sits down with him in front of her spinning wheel. With a little maneuvering, she finds the means to manage treadle and flax with him on her lap, and she starts the wheel turning again. The _sss – sss – sss_ of the wheel is like the short, steady breath of a coursing animal.

She finds the rhythm of her work again, falls into the steady motions of pressing the treadle and playing out the flax. It takes careful attention to keep the right amount of tension – she wants a thin, fine thread, nothing coarse or abrasive.

Loki’s small hands clutch her collar. She feels him shift and turn his head so that he can keep one eye on the spinning wheel. For a long time her spinning has been directionless, a mere hobby, but lately she has begun to discern, though faintly, a possible end goal, a defined project. It will be a long time before it is finished, but that is alright. She has time.

They do not speak, but she feels him begin to relax by degrees, soothed by her presence and the rhythm of the spinning wheel. When he falls into a doze, exhausted, she suspects, by the demands placed on his self-control by his unmerited punishment, she takes him back to his own room, tucks him in, presses a kiss to his temple and promises to look after him.

//

The nurse is disposed of without fuss or bother. There is a hint of scandal, the breath of rumour, and the All-Father finds himself obliged to pack her off and look about for a new caretaker for his sons. Gossip, after all, cannot be allowed attach itself to one charged with the care of Asgard’s crown princes.

//

As he grows, Loki continues to struggle with his Jotun blood, although of course he does not know that is what it is. Frigga does not agree with the All-Father’s decision to hide his heritage from him, but she cannot protest overmuch. There is, after all, only one throne in Asgard.

He has trouble understanding idioms related to concepts of heat and coldness, and it is some time before she realizes it is because his own experiences are in many ways opposite to those of the people around him. When the boys’ teacher lets them off early from their lessons as a treat, he calls her ‘cold-hearted’, and is startled and hurt when she accuses him of ingratitude.

He withdraws a little after that: becomes more watchful, almost wary. No longer the first to speak, Frigga sees him listen more, alert to details. He learns how to conform.

//

The brothers are best friends: and so they fight _constantly_. They use words and weapons alternately, insults escalating to blows, or, alternately, a melee of fists and feet giving way to bickering once they are too bruised and tired to throw a punch. It is exhausting. Frigga’s patience is sometimes stretched to the limit, and she grows weary of the number of black eyes, broken noses and chipped teeth she is called upon to heal. Still, she remembers all the altercations with her sisters that had required the mediation of their mother, and she knows they love each other.

//

She loves Thor – how could she not? – but it is Loki she takes the most pains over, and whom she keeps by her side.

She teaches him magic, and he takes to it with a precocity that, she thinks, must be at least partly due to his Jotun blood. The Jotuns have some shape-shifting abilities of their own.

She teaches him stories and songs, too, in the language of Vanaheim. Odin catches them at it one day and has the audacity to laugh at Loki as he is puzzling away over the reading she has given him.

“What’s this?” he demands, lifting the book out of her son’s hands. “A waste of time! You’ll have no need of it, you have the All-Speak to understand this for you!”

Busy at her spinning wheel (it is becoming a wearisome task, but she is patient), Frigga smiles.

“Humour an old woman’s folly,” she says. She does not tell him that she hates the All-Speak, despises how it takes away the distinctions between their peoples. The Aesir voices that surround her, when hammered into the stylized form of the Vanir language she understands, come across as flat and bland; and she is aware that when she speaks, the Vanir words she uses can only find poor counterparts in the Aesir language.

The All-Father laughs again, and clasps her shoulders in an affectionate gesture that jostles her hands and leaves a knot in the thread she is spinning.

“Never old,” he says warmly, and kisses her. He is on his way to the throne room, to an audience with the Alfheim ambassador, and he is content to leave his wife and younger son to whatever nonsense they care to indulge in.

She notices Loki watching her after his father has left. The book (it is one of the epic poems of Vanaheim, one every schoolchild learns by heart) lies in his lap, but he has not tried to find his place again.

Frigga unwinds the thread from the bobbin, finds the knot and works at unplucking it.

“Your father is correct,” she tells him. “The All-Speak allows you to speak and understand every language in the Nine Realms.” The knot is a stubborn one: she will have to cut it out. “But words have a power and a meaning beyond mere definitions - and that is a power that can never be understood by those who are content to listen to the languages of others being forced into Aesir forms.”

Her son does not immediately reply.

“You do not have to continue with our lessons, if you do not wish to do so,” she adds.

He does not ask any questions, but a moment later he reopens the book, and resumes his struggle with the unfamiliar syllables.

The tension leaves her shoulders. She pushes down with her foot on the treadle as he resumes his reading, and begins to spin again.

Some of her favourite memories are of quiet evenings spent working at her spinning wheel and, later, at her loom, listening to her son read to her in her mother tongue.

The other lessons she teaches him are more subtle. How to smile and speak softly in the face of provocation, rather than spitting defiance. How to equivocate, how to flatter, how to say one thing and mean another. While Thor learns a warrior’s arts in the training fields under his father’s eye, Loki learns the graces of a courtier at his mother’s knee.

//

He grows up lean and lanky, with a slender body and a musician’s hands. He is adept at shape-shifting, and if he so desired he could shape himself to become as strong as Thor, as well-developed, but he doesn’t and she is glad. She does not want him to be another Thor.

Although he is never consumed by the lust for combat the way his brother is, Loki nevertheless learns to fight. He is quick on his feet and blessed with excellent proprioception, both of which give him an advantage over the bull-headed, bullying tactics of the Aesir warriors. When they grow frustrated over fighting an opponent who, whenever they strike, simply _isn’t there_ , they become surly and sneering, speak slightingly of ‘tricks’ and ask how much bravery it takes to run away.

He shrugs the insults off with a laugh and a smirk, but she knows they rankle. Once or twice, on occasions of almost unprecedented vulnerability, he lets slip to her his desire to prove himself through some great act of physical bravery. The admission alarms her and she tries to dissuade him, to draw him away from emulating the Aesir’s foolish ideal of manhood, but she cannot be sure that she is entirely successful.

Now it is his turn to teach _her_. It is Loki who brings her a sword and daggers, who takes her through drills and teaches her the proper stances. He spars with her and she learns how to feint and when to attack, and where to strike a killing blow.

The All-Father, as he so often is by the antics of his wife and younger son, is amused. He thinks it is a whim, a childish fancy – why should she need to learn self-defence, when she lives in a palace as well-guarded as Asgard’s? But Frigga is determined to learn. She is not satisfied with leaving her safety in Aesir hands. At the back of her mind (though there is no one she can confide in, no one she can confess it to – not even her son, this time, can know her thoughts) is the figure of Farbuti, Loki’s birth mother.

It took her a long time, and much subtle questioning, to learn her name, and how she died. The Jotun women are warriors: bigger and stronger than their men, it was they who were guarding the temple when the All-Father and his warriors forced the battle into the very heart of Jotunheim.

Farbuti was a queen, and she died fighting to protect her son and her Realm: and, though she would have to confess to feeling ambivalent on the subject of fighting for Asgard, Frigga knows, at a level that is bone-deep, that if it comes to it, she too will fight to the death for her sons.

Their lessons continue. Loki is happy to teach her. He is pleased and flattered that she listens so closely to his instructions, and is gratified that she has asked _him_ for help and guidance, instead of turning – as so many of their cohorts do – to Thor.

//

She knows immediately that something is wrong when Loki enters her room and her son – her fine, graceful, clever son – promptly trips over her workbasket and smacks his shin against her floor loom.

“I’m fine,” he says automatically, and frowns, as though personally offended, at the tip of his own nose. He repeats: “Everything is fine.”

Frigga puts down her shuttle, folds her hands in her lap and waits. Clearly, everything is not fine, but she knows it is pointless to try and force him into a confidence. She wonders, briefly, if he has been drinking, but it is not like him to imbibe so early in the afternoon and she cannot smell any alcohol on him.

“How has your day been, my dear?” she asks instead, very calmly.

Loki frowns and licks his lips. He is unsteady on his feet, and his usual pale complexion has an unhealthy tinge to it. “It – we have been sparring,” he says, enunciating the words with extravagant clarity. “And then we went to the baths.” He screws up his face, and presses the palm of his hand against the side of his head. “I think I’m sick,” he admits, pathetically.

Frigga is on her feet and at his side in an instant. Among their other bodily indulgences, the Aesir are fond of sitting for hours on end in steam rooms and then plunging into cold baths or snow, depending on the season. It is usually a harmless, though self-indulgent pastime, but with Loki’s acute sensitivity to heat it is no wonder that it has made him unwell.

She takes his arm and realizes that his tunic is drenched with sweat.

“Come, let me look after you,” she urges, and he lets himself be ushered into her bedroom, stumbling a little – but where he would have dropped down onto the couch under the window, she keeps him on his feet and guides him into the small but luxuriously appointed bathing room next door.

She releases him and he stands in the center of the room, swaying slightly as he frowns at the claw-footed bathtub.

“Get in,” she orders, sweeping her skirts out of the way as she kneels and opens the tap. “Never mind about your clothes,” she adds, as he begins struggling with the straps to his ridiculous leather tunic, “just get in and lie down.”

He obeys and climbs in, uttering a groan of relief as the cold water washes over him. He sinks down as low as he can, folding up his long legs so he can duck his head under the surface of the water.

Frigga leaves the tap open and returns to her sitting room. Some servant has put out an arrangement of fresh fruit in a bowl of crushed ice and she seizes it, turns the fruits out onto the table without caring where they roll, and hurries back to the bath.

Loki is still submerged, but the trail of bubbles leading from his lips to the surface of the water reassures her that he is alive, at least. She empties the bowl of ice into the bath, and turns off the water before it can overflow onto the floor. In the sudden silence, she hears the tread of heavy footsteps in the outer room just before Thor calls her.

Her eldest son, loitering about her sitting room with the dangerously aimless air of a man who is moments away from touching something he shouldn’t, brightens as she enters the room. The steam baths have left him rosy-cheeked and shining, as benefits one who has spent the day in health-giving exercise, and along with the scent of cedar, he infuses the room with a palpable atmosphere of good-humour and high spirits. He catches her in an embrace, and she cannot help but smile as she presses a kiss to his cheek.

“And how has your day been, dear?” she asks, settling back down at her loom as he throws himself onto the couch nearby. Inwardly she is still needled by her anxiety on behalf of her younger son, but she gives no sign of it. Loki is proud, and he guards his self-respect jealously. He would think it a betrayal if she told his brother of his recent illness, and so she keeps her peace.

“Excellent!” Thor pronounces, evidently well-satisfied with himself. “I won a sword bout against Fandral today…” And he is off, speaking a language that she can only partly understand, about advances and fades, long point and pass back, grips and guards. She listens with half an ear as she weaves, murmuring the appropriate notes of admiration and approval that she has learned through long years of listening to his father speak on similar subjects.

“… And then we went to the baths,” he finishes, and frowns. “By the way, have you seen Loki?”

Frigga’s hands do not pause as she moves them over the strings of her loom. “Not recently, no.” The lie comes easily. She has closed the doors to her bedroom and to the bath, and there is little chance that she will be caught. “Has something happened?” She is curious to see what he will say about his brother’s health.

“Oh, nothing much, just that we were sitting in the steam room when, all of a sudden, up he jumps and bolts like a rabbit! Something about having business to attend to. I thought you might know where he had to go off to in such a hurry.”

Frigga passes her shuttle through the threads, slides the beater bar forwards, and pulls the lever of the harness. The arrangement of threads changes with a shudder and a thump. The rhythm of it is soothing, as familiar to her as the rhythm of thrust and parry is to Thor.

“There were a few commissions I asked him to carry out for me,” she says. It is another lie, but she has asked for similar favours enough times in the past to make it plausible. “Perhaps that’s where he is.”

“No doubt,” Thor agrees, but he looks doubtful for a moment before the expression is erased by his customary smile. He bounds to his feet, as blithe and energetic as always. “Well! I’m off, Volstagg said there’s a sword at the blacksmith’s he wants my opinion on…”

He stoops for another kiss, and is halfway across the room when he pauses, next to the table that had until recently borne the bowl of fruit and ice. Now, Vanir apples and plums from Alfheim lie scattered across its surface.

Thor considers the mess thoughtfully. Frigga nearly forgets the shuttle in her hand.

Then he reaches out, picks up a peach, and bites into it with every sign of satisfaction as he bounces off to his appointment with Volstagg without a backwards glance.

The door hardly closes behind him before Frigga leaps up from her seat and dashes back to the bathing room.

She finds Loki sitting with his ankles propped up on the edge of the bath, staring moodily at the melting chips of ice that float on the surface of the water between his knees. His eyes flicker up to meet hers as she kneels down and presses the flat of her hand against his forehead. His skin feels reassuringly cool to the touch.

He doesn’t speak as she arranges her skirts and sits down, laying her arm along the edge of the bath and resting her head on it. She reaches out to rub the back of his neck and he drops his head forwards, leans into her touch. The sodden fabric of his clothes drapes heavily over his shoulders, floats in folds on the still water.

“What is wrong with me?” he asks at last, very quietly.

She cups the side of his head, pulls him closer so that she can press a kiss against his temple.

“ _Nothing_ is wrong with you,” she urges. He does not seem convinced. “You did very well. I’m proud of you.”

She _is_ proud of him. He has learned to use conventional turns of phrase now, speaking of ‘the heat of the moment’ and ‘the warmth of gratitude’ without betraying how utterly foreign the expressions are to his own experience. She knows he feigns enjoyment of hot drinks when the evenings turn crisp, has heard him speak eloquently of the pleasures of a warm fire on a cold night while at the same time edging his seat further away from the hearth.

It occurs to her that Asgard must at times seem as strange and inexplicable to him as it had been for her when she had first arrived, when even the kindest courtiers had laughed over her awkwardness, her surprise over what were to them the most ordinary things in the world. She, too, had to learn how to conform and she did, although the obligation, the assumption that _she_ would change while others would stay the same, had sometimes made her fists clench and the tears stand out in her eyes.

She will always be proud of him.

//

He still slips up, occasionally. Elated by a recent success in battle and made careless from too much wine at the feast afterwards, he calls Sif ‘frigid’. He intends it as a compliment, but he slinks back to his rooms that night with a split lip and hurt feelings.

//

He hides other things, too. He bears no battle scars, not because he shirks combat but because he uses his magic to hide them, to shift them from his skin. She approves. Among the Vanir, scars are a mark of shame, a sign of a failure to anticipate. A Vanir warrior would never flaunt a missing eye. A Vanir king would never mistake it for a mark of valour.

She encourages these differences. Subtly, she draws him farther apart from the Aesir, enlarges the differences between them. She commiserates with him over the seeming folly of his brother and their friends: it is an Aesir custom, these are Aesir manners, Aesir ways that must be tolerated, indulged, flattered into complacency. It is selfish of her, she knows, but she desires it to be so. She has spent so long alone in this strange court, among these strange people with their unfamiliar ways.

Even though Loki spends his whole childhood on Asgard, even though he remembers nothing of his birth, he grows up as a stranger among the Aesir.

//

Frigga has dreams of Vanaheim, sometimes, and wonders if her son dreams of snow.

//

He begins to draw away from her as he grows older, preferring the company of his brother and their friends to hers. It is only natural, and she lets him go with a smile, outwardly serene. Still, she cannot help wishing, sometimes, for a daughter: a daughter, she thinks, she could have kept with her always.

He still seeks her out, but less frequently, half-embarrassed and newly-shy. He brings her presents from the places he travels to, and she gives them pride of place to show him that she accepts his apologies.

This time, he comes back from Vanaheim with new books and the piece she needs for her loom (the wood seems to last for hardly any time at all – mere decades). She is grateful, of course, but somehow she cannot bring herself to open them. It is difficult for her to think of her homeland, how days and years and centuries have passed and brought changes with them that she has never seen. Her world has moved on without her.

She keeps her eyes on her weaving. There, the only change is that the roll of cloth around the beam has grown thicker than it was when she first began.

“It’s a beautiful place,” Loki tells her. He is sitting in the window seat, looking down into the training yard below, where his brother is sparring. He traveled without Thor this time, and so has escaped the rounds of official welcomes and formal feasts that would otherwise have attended a visit by the princes of Asgard, and has seen the private face of Vanaheim instead. Loki is good at circumvention.

He adds: “You should go back. You must miss it.”

“But my home is here,” she says, lightly. “And my husband, and my sons - most of the time.”

He casts her a sideways glance. “So Father forbids it?” he guesses, shrewdly.

It would not be politic for the queen of Asgard to leave the Realm, and she has never bothered to ask permission. It would be degrading to voice a request that cannot be granted. “My duty lies here.”

He comes around behind her, places his hands on her shoulders as she adjusts the tension of the warp threads.

“I think your _duty_ could stand to gather dust for a few weeks, hm?” he says quietly, and his voice is friendly enough to almost mask the cutting edge.

She stiffens, and immediately he is abject: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Of course you know your responsibilities best.”

Behind the words, she can catch an echo of a child, left alone in the nursery while his brother was sent off to play: _Don’t be angry, don’t leave me, I’m sorry_.

He has acquired a reputation as someone who traffics in mistruths and misdirection, but she knows that this is not what makes those around him uncomfortable. The Aesir court can put up with his tricks and practical jokes, but what it hates is listening to him speak the truths it would rather not hear.

“Never apologize for being right,” she tells him, with a certain amount of irony of her own. Except for when he is with her, there is very little danger of Loki ever apologizing for anything at all.

//

Thor is named king: and Loki’s heart breaks.

He hides it well, but he is her son and she knows. No matter how well he might dissemble, show delight, and cover his disappointment with a mask of cheerfulness – she _knows_ , even as he makes a show of kneeling, only half in jest, at Thor’s feet.

“My _king_ ,” he says.

Thor pulls him upright, embarrassed, although not so much so that it can take away the proud smile he wears.

“Please,” he begs. “None of this. We are brothers – _family_ \- and nothing will change that.”

Frigga cannot help looking towards the All-Father, who is overlooking this touching scene from his throne, but he seems to find nothing even remotely humorous about Thor's choice of words at all.

Loki is still smiling as he steps back, leaves room for others to crowd forwards and offer their congratulations, and she wonders if she alone can see how the expression doesn’t reach his eyes.

She catches up with him before he can slip away and disappear altogether. For the first time in all their long lives together, she finds she does not know what to say. There is so much she wants to tell him: don’t let them think you are jealous, have confidence, be patient, _wait_.

“I am proud of you,” she says instead, impulsively, because it feels more important than any lecture she could read him, and because (she is afraid) he hasn’t heard it as often as he should.

For a long while, Loki is silent. When he does speak, his voice is peculiar.

“You can go to Vanaheim now,” he says, without meeting her eyes. “ _He’ll_ let you go.”

Her breath catches in her throat. He is right. If she asks Thor, while the All-Father is in the Odinsleep, he would let her go – she could see Vanaheim again, revisit the scenes of her childhood, see her people, her friends, her _family_.

But – it has been so long now. She has spent centuries on Asgard, in a foreign kingdom, and most of it has passed with only the most cursory word from Vanaheim. So much must have changed. She does not belong there anymore, and even though she will never truly belong on Asgard, her work is here.

“And what should I do on Vanaheim?” she asks him, fighting hard to keep a smile on her lips and the sorrow from her voice. She holds out her hand. “Come and read to me for a bit. I see so little of you, these days.”

But he backs away, shaking his head.

“Later,” he says. He still will not raise his eyes to meet hers. “I have… business to attend to.”

 _Business_.

It is not long before she regrets neglecting to ask what sort of business, and with whom.

//

Tired of waiting for an opportunity to prove himself equal in courage and bravery to the Aesir, Loki manufactures one. She can approve of that part. Do not trust to chance, she has told him, and create your own luck. He certainly does that.

The All-Father, in his rage, banishes Thor to Midgard. Frigga is alarmed and she fears for him, but not excessively so. Thor is elastic, flexible – he will adapt, and he can make friends anywhere. Besides which, he is his father’s favourite, and his heir. Odin will think better of his actions and rescind his punishment soon enough.

But the All-Father slips into the Odinsleep earlier than expected, and Loki becomes king. She finds this is less an occasion for pride than it is for anxiety. This is not how it is supposed to go. It is too soon. This is not what she has planned for.

And then there is the affair with the Destroyer and the assassination of Laufey and the attempted destruction of Jotunheim, and she comes very near to despair. He is still so young, so _stupid_! These are the actions of a fretful, anxious boy, not the king she wants him to be! She is even glad when the All-Father awakes. His discipline will, she expects, be harsh, but that does not signify. She is only eager to have her son in hand once more, to correct his faults and show him where he has been in error. He will do better next time.

But Loki…

Loki does not fall.

He _lets go_.

He forgets her, and he lets go. He sinks into the endless night, the space between worlds, and a part of Frigga sinks with him.

//

Her grief is boundless, and well-concealed. Outwardly she is sorrowful, but calm. Inwardly, she rages. She wonders that her veins do not burst, that her hair does not turn white, that her body should be unmarked when her soul is so bruised.

She keeps a smile on her face when the All-Father speaks to her, saying it is all for the best, but she wishes she could rail at him, strike him. It was you, her thoughts scream while her lips give empty acquiescence, you, you, you, it was you who drove my son away, who commanded him to die. You took him away from me, and he was _mine_.

When she is alone in her chambers once more, facing the loom that has dominated the room for so long, she comes very close to ordering it taken away and destroyed. It is too painful, it hurts too much, for it to be here when he is gone. She can hardly bear to look at the roll of undyed cloth, the natural colour of the flax it is woven from. A hundred, a thousand times she almost tears it apart, cuts it up, gives it away, burns it.

In the end, though, she does no such thing. It has been a part of her life for too long; the labour that has gone into it is too closely bound up in her mind with the time she spent with _him_ , and however much it pains her now, she cannot allow herself to let those memories go.

And besides that – she cannot really, truly believe that he is not coming back. He cannot be gone entirely. There is too much that he has still to do, there are still so many plans that she has made for him.

She does return to her weaving, but the work goes slowly. Eventually the cloth is finished, but she leaves it on the loom, and cannot bring herself to cut the final threads.

//

Thor brings her some measure of comfort. He comes back from Midgard soft-eyed over his mortal love in a way that she has never seen in Odin. Perhaps there is hope for him as a king yet.

Or maybe not.

He tells her of Midgard and its people, how clever they are, how brave and resourceful.

“It is a worthy Realm,” he says. “I will be proud to be their protector,” and his words make her feel ill.

And what will you protect them from?, she longs to ask. Will you protect them from Asgard and the Einherjar guards when the All-Father decides they have grown upstart and dangerous? Will you protect them the way the All-Father protected Vanaheim, when he laid siege to their kingdom and forced them to accept peace as a brideprice?

Will you protect them the way he protected Jotunheim, when he ploughed a path of destruction straight into the heart of their Realm and tore a wailing infant from the grasp of its dead mother?

Because Asgard, she has learned, over the long millennia of being a stranger in that land, is a dragon that steals children from their parents and queens from their rightful thrones; a serpent that swallows defiance and insurrection, and spits out the bones for the survivors to rebuild with. The vaults beneath Asgard’s palace are swollen with toys the All-Father has deemed too dangerous for his children to play with: the Casket of Ancient Winters, the Aether, the Tesseract. Every time some other Realm has come close to asserting itself, to exerting some modicum of free will, its people have looked up and seen the Bifrost open over their heads, pouring forth Aesir warriors who have beaten them back into submission and snatched the crumbs of power from their hands. The so-called Protectors of the Nine Realms protect only Aesir pre-eminence; and the All-Father is one who strikes down his own children on a whim, takes away their power, casts them out into the desolate, sunless wastes of his displeasure.

Loki would have understood. But he is gone, and there is no one here for her to speak her mind to.

She holds her tongue in front of Thor, smiles and asks him about Jane Foster (an outlandish name!) instead.

Still, though she does her best to hide it, it becomes difficult to meet her husband with any semblance of cheerfulness, to stomach the smells of the kingdom’s bloody feasts, to endure the sight of the sleek and satisfied faces that surround her, fat with self-confidence and complacency. Already Thor has caught the germ of his father's paternalistic attitude: no doubt Odin finds this a desirable trait in the future All-Father, but for Frigga it is a symptom that forces her to admit that Asgard’s poison runs too deeply to be cured.

It will have to be cut out. Destroyed.

Asgard, she decides, will _burn_.

She holds her rage close, watches it grow, fans it with the slights she has endured as a queen without a throne, feeds it the fuel she has stored up over long years of silence. When the time is right, she decides, Asgard will pay the price – not only for the death of her son, but for all the lives its pride and arrogance have taken over many long millennia.

//

Of course, as it turns out, Loki is _not_ dead, and for a time Frigga becomes enraged for entirely different reasons.

It is a good thing, she thinks as she stands beside the All-Father listening to Heimdall’s dire news of her son, that she has had so long to practise control. Otherwise the very stones of the Observatory would burst, the Bifrost itself (so recently repaired) be torn in two by the strength of her feelings.

“Who gave you this power?” Thor asks him on Midgard, where Frigga would have screamed: how can you account my gifts for so little, that you would accept power from someone else?

How can you be so blind as to squander your rage on Jotunheim or on Midgard when Asgard itself still stands?

Her feelings are almost too much to bear. She retreats to her chambers more and more frequently, and if the Aesir around her think she mourns for the dead on Midgard she does not contradict them.

//

Finally – _finally_ – she allows herself to cut into the cloth she has laboured over for so long.

//

She has regained most of her composure by the time he is brought back to Asgard in chains, so that when she sees him again she does not immediately fall on him and shake him until his teeth rattle.

Her first thought, when he pauses before her in the throne room, is that he has become so much older. It breaks her heart and she grieves, as a mother might who has had to give up her child as an infant and now sees it returned to her, grown to adulthood. There was so much more I had to teach you, she thinks. _Why did you let go?_

“Are you proud of me, mother?” he asks.

She has always been proud of him.

“Please, don’t make this worse,” she warns him. It is such a petty, meaningless thing to say after what each of them has been through, after all the time they have spent apart: but the eye of the All-Father is upon them, and she dares not say more.

“Leave us,” Odin commands, and she obeys – she _must_ obey, even though this second, lesser separation tears at her heart. She has had to spend too long cajoling and flattering the All-Father into some small semblance of clemency to risk it all by showing anything less than instant compliance.

Privately, though, she vows that the King of Asgard will someday know what it is to be struck as mortal a blow as the one he is making her suffer now.

She keeps her head up and her step firm as she hurries to her chambers, a queen in bearing always. There are many eyes on her, and she cannot forget that she is, always, a princess of Vanaheim. So she smiles graciously at those she passes, pretends to admire a fine display of flowers, and waits until the doors to her suite have closed behind her before curling her hands into fists.

The furniture and fixtures in her apartment lift off the floor, and hurtle themselves against the walls. Books fling themselves off the shelves and burst, scattering pages like dead leaves. The fountain in the middle of the room cracks asunder, and the water hits the ceiling in a fine spray.

She flings herself into the one chair that hasn’t been knocked awry and surveys the destruction she has wrought with a kind of animal satisfaction. So rarely does she permit herself such storms of rage that she discovers she is panting.

The fountain still spouts water. The fine spray off it mists her cheeks. With a sigh, she sits up straight, marshals her thoughts, and puts the room to rights with a wave of her hands. As a last step, she raises her hands to her head, and her hair twines itself back into its customary braid, which had come undone. When she stands and regards herself in the mirror (the shards of glass shiver, and spring back into the frame), she is a queen once more – calm, regal and unmoved, ready, now, to _think_.

Of course she will visit him. It is foolish of Odin to try and decree otherwise. She has her magic, even if Loki is banned from using his, and it is a poor wife who has not kept some secrets from her husband through years of marriage. She will be gentle with him, no matter how badly she longs to berate him, upbraid him for his foolishness in indulging in such unstructured destruction. The Destroyer, the Bifrost, and the Chitauri: all of these are blunt instruments, wielded where he should have used a scalpel. There is so much more he has to learn, so many lessons that have not yet sunk in.

No matter. She has time: she will be patient.

Satisfied that her sitting room is in order once more, and that no one is coming to disturb her, she rises and enters her bedroom, being careful to close and lock the door behind her. She kneels by the chest at the foot of her bed, whispers the enchantment that opens it, and carefully pulls back the lid.

The homespun linen, now coloured a deep and brilliant green, feels soft and supple under her fingertips as she withdraws the garment.

Since Loki has fallen so far from grace, she has had to work in secret now – the colour alone would be enough to give away the intended recipient, never mind that Thor’s broad chest and biceps would certainly burst the seams. She dyed the cloth herself, using materials and plant bases from Vanaheim, and without her clever, far-ranging son to fetch what she requires she has placed her reliance on Hogun instead. He is steady, reliable, not given to idle chatter, and he is Vanir. She has no fear that he will noise her private business abroad.

She holds the tunic at arm’s length, pleased with her handiwork. It has taken so long, years of working in fits and starts, of fumbling to learn humble domestic arts that were never part of her curriculum in the Vanaheim palace. Now, at last, it is almost finished – now she can see what she has been working towards from the very start.

There is only the embroidery left to do, and she has the needles and thread at hand. The garment must be richly ornamented, and she knows just how she will do it. She will cast her mind back, dredge up her memories of the tapestries and wall hangings of her native Vanaheim, will take the heraldry of that Realm, which is still so dear to her, and cast its forms into something new, something to be shared between her and her son.

She settles herself in the window seat, plucks a thread from the skein, pulls it through the eye of the needle, and begins to sew. The thread is gold, of course – nothing less will do.

A king must look properly regal on his coronation day, after all.

The needlework is elaborate. It will take time to complete it properly. She will not rush. She will be patient. She has time. There is no small distance between the prison cells of Asgard and the throne of whatever kingdom her son chooses to claim for himself, but she has faith that he will surmount it. With her to help him, how can he not?

She will not rush. She will be patient. She will keep herself busy and she will labour diligently, always looking ahead to the day when she will see _both_ of her sons crowned.

Both her sons, each of whom was born to be a king.

//

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, and thank you for all your lovely and thoughtful comments! <3


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